The 2 Step Method For Landing PR

A client of ours, Mutu, made the news a few weeks ago.

They ended up with 70+ enquiries and many qualified leads.

Not bad, given that their paid advertising is generating leads at $100+.

Here’s how to get in front of reporters and get them to talk about your business.

Part 1 - Finding The Right Person To Pitch

1. Choose an outlet you want to pitch that covers your business vertical - e.g Business Desk
   > Go to their site
   > Type in the search bar your vertical
   

   

   > Look at the list of articles and sort them by recency
   > Find the author of the article & go to their bio

   

   > If you are lucky, they will have contact details you can access. If not, you'll have to go digging (type into Google "(Name) + Business Desk + social media profiles)

Part 2 - Crafting the pitch

1. Go to ChatGPT

2. Use the following prompt:
   
   “Please find any articles that have been written by (https://businessdesk.co.nz/journalist/peter-griffin) in the last two weeks and summarise a concise pitch for my own business (https://www.tacitintelligence.co/) and link to reasons why he should cover our business?”
   

3. Refine your pitch based on the output it offers - here’s what it gave us:

   

4. Convert this into an email - with potential headlines so the reporter doesn’t have to do that much work:
   
   “Kia ora Peter,
   

   I listened to your most recent piece on OpenClaw. Have you set something up locally for Business Desk?
   
   I thought I’d try my hand at pitching you something that aligns with your most recent AI articles.
   

   We've received $1M in R&D funding from Callaghan Innovation to capture expert judgement and institutional knowledge at Tacit Intelligence.
   

   In 2019, an Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management paper found that up to 80% of organisational knowledge is tacit.
   
   That’s what we’re capturing and deploying as AI so that every company actually has a unique moat.
   
   Not the data that every other company has access to.
   
   I've pulled together a few headlines for you that might pique your interest:
   

   • The economic cost of losing institutional knowledge — and the NZ startup trying to digitise expert judgement

   • From chatbots to judgement engines: NZ company building AI trained on human expertise

   • Can AI preserve institutional knowledge in the public sector?
     

   Given your focus on applied AI and NZ innovation, I thought this might be a relevant story rather than another generic AI launch.
   
   Feel free to tell me I'm barking up the wrong tree.
   

   Cheers,
   Kale”

I used this method to land PR for Rugby Bricks back in 2019, and those same articles were mentioned again in November last year.

If you need help pitching your business, shoot me a reply, and I’ll help you write up some angles.

Customer Development

Hey. Sorry. Ran out of time and energy today. So this is a quick one.

I’ve been doing customer development for Gravy.

Which means conversations with our “avatar” - asking them questions about their work and trying to find problems that they might be willing to pay us to solve.

I’ve done this a bunch of times for Gravy.

But previously I’d DM on LinkedIn or email ahead to book times to speak. Its a sucky process. Even with tools like Calendly, nailing down people to a time to speak can be painful.

Lots of times my DM or email convo's would end in “can you just send me the questions”. And then they don’t respond or give me 5 word answers. Which is largely useless for customer development.

Anyway, so this time I went old school. I just called them. No pre-text or anything. “Hey can I ask you some questions” then into it.

I've gone from spending two weeks doing outreach to book 3 or 4 calls. To on my best day so far, completing 5 calls in 90 minutes.

Basically no-ones got time to talk when you ask them for permission first. But picking up the phone skips that part.